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HMA R-100
was one half of the Imperial Airship Scheme. The brainchild of Christopher
Thomson, the British Minister of Air, the Scheme, was a farsighted plan
to connect the far flung colonies of the “empire on which the sun never set”,
with regular, reliable, and expedient airship service. The first ship, R-100,
the lesser known cousin of the infamous R-101, was chosen to fly a
transatlantic route to Canada. The ship was the engineering brainchild of
Barnes Wallis (later famous for WWII’s ‘bouncing bomb’ and his various designs
for a supersonic airliner) and Nevil S. Norway (later acclaimed as the
successful author Nevil Shute). The design and construction of R-100
represented a leap in airship design, going so far as to influence both the
structure and passenger accommodations of Germany’s A.S. Hindenburg. In fact,
the streamlined, elliptically shaped envelopes of both the R-100 and the R-101 held
such an technological advantage over the earlier Zeppelins…